Expressing Technology: A Roundtable With Sir James Dyson

Michael Faraday's design to measure electromagnetic conversion

Sir James Dyson at Wired's NYC office. Photo: Dave Mosher/Wired.com

On Wednesday, Sept. 14, Wired hosted a roundtable with Sir James Dyson at our New York offices. Dyson and his staff began by showing off their new vacuum cleaner (the DC 41) and Dyson Hot, a new fan/space heater, which was being introduced later that day.

We asked Sir James questions about every aspect of emerging and commercial technology, ranging from intellectual property and education reform to the overlap between Steve Jobs’ design philosophy and his own. We learned (among other things) why research and development in battery technology and artificial intelligence are critical to the future of household cleaning, and why it’s harder to sell high-end vacuum cleaners in China and Brazil.

Wired’s interviewers included Steven Levy, John Abell, Jason Tanz, Dave Mosher and Tim Carmody. Dawn Lim, Dave Mosher and Tim Carmody transcribed the conversation. Tim Carmody moderated the roundtable, edited the responses, and wrote this introduction. Except where noted, all images are courtesy of Dyson.com.

On becoming the company’s public face and namesake

Sir James Dyson: The first Dyson was a 13th century female cattle rustler in Lancashire. That’s the origin of the name. And it’s two syllables, so it’s quite nice.

Right at the beginning, the retailers wouldn’t take me, because they said, “You’re not a brand name. Nobody’s going to want to buy a ‘Dyson.’ They’d rather buy an Electrolux, Bosch, or Siemens” or something like that. The only way to overcome that was to be a person. They’re all big, anonymous corporations, and the founders are long since gone. So the thing is to be different, and to be responsible for what you do.

That’s why I put myself about a bit, as you say. And I put myself about a bit now to understand what’s going on in the world, rather than spending my time back where I’d probably rather be, actually: with the engineers, developing new products.

On the relationship between design and technology

Dyson: We’re a technology company. We’re employing more and more scientists, and working in lots of — we may be in more prosaic areas, we’re not in this sort of sexy things. Thing that people don’t bother with, that need technological improvement, which makes a big difference. That’s what interests me.

So that’s our starting point. We look at something that has a problem, whether it’s hand dryers or vacuum cleaners. Then we develop technology. We want the product to express the technology we’re using, so that people understand it. Even if they don’t totally understand it, they might half understand it. Even if they only one-quarter understand it, at least they see that we’re doing something different that makes it work better, and perhaps gives them a bit of pleasure to see that and point it out to people.

[Picks up a copy of Wired] When you say design, everybody thinks of magazine pages. So it’s an emotive word. Everybody thinks it’s how something looks, whereas for me, design is pretty much everything. It’s the technology it uses, how it’s engineered, how it’s put together, the quality, how long it lasts.

I don’t particularly follow the Bauhaus school of design, where you make everything into a black box — simplify it. I want something more expressive. It’s very easy to make something like a heater into a black box. It might look impressively designed for a few moments, but it has no expression.

That’s why our heater shows its technology; the heating component, and that’s the main part, is bright blue. It’s a very simple product, but at least it still expresses what it does. And it looks different, it doesn’t look like an ordinary heater. On the vacuum cleaner, we show the bits that really work, like the cyclones. That’s the important bit, and we want people to understand it, to know that it’s more efficient than a bag, but it also looks nicer than a bag. In the whole experience of using it, the customer can start to follow the trail of the engineers and scientists making it.

The retailers said, “You’ll never sell a vacuum cleaner where you can see the dirt.” I’m not normally one to do market research, but we did a bit of market research, and the research confirmed it: No one wanted to see the dirt. We made it see-through, by the way, to see what was happening. It was very practical. But the engineers and I loved it. So we decided to ignore the market research. Our competitors had a good snicker about it. But we persevered.

On the importance of incorporating next-generation R&D into products

Wired:What do you think about the Roomba?

I don’t like to talk about what our competitors are doing, but I can tell you what we’re doing [with robotic vacuum cleaners], and you can infer what we think about the Roomba. We want ours to navigate properly. And also to clean properly. It is a vacuum cleaner; it has to clean, and not just tickle the surface. We’ve been quite ambitious with what we’re doing, which is why it’s taken quite a long time. We’ve been hiring roboticists and working on it for 12 years.

The easiest way [to solve the navigation problem] is to make it random. It’s dead easy, and so that’s what they’ve all done so far. But then when you start actually navigating, there are various degrees of success. Rooms are all very different; they have different shapes and different surfaces…. Random machines have various efficiencies at covering the room. It might cover only 70 percent of it. If you do a square, it might cover 90 percent. But the moment you’ve got a proper room with furniture in it, you get into big trouble.

And you’ve got to do it efficiently. You see, if you’re going to vacuum properly, you’ve got to use a huge amount of power. If you use a huge amount of power, you can’t do it for very long, because you haven’t got enough battery life. So, therefore, your navigation has got to be very efficient.

We’re writing the software for the IEC that measures the efficiency of a vacuum-cleaning robot that goes across the floor. There are a lot of shenanigans, as you can imagine, about how do you measure the efficiency of robots and how you measure the cleaning efficiency of vacuums.

Wired: Could you talk about your battery development?

Dyson: Well, I can’t tell you the secret of it. [laughter]

I can talk in generalities. I think all of the new developments are much more environmental. Carbon nanotube technologies, these sorts of things that will make batteries better.

We actually have a different requirement for batteries than most people. In [laptops] and in cars, you want batteries to last a long time with a small power draw. We’re at the opposite end of the scale. We have a massive power draw in a short space of time. Something like a capacitor is a much better technology for us than a battery. So we’ve realized than in order to get the batteries we want, we have to develop them ourselves.

Wired: Improving all sorts of batteries?

Dyson: Yes, lots of people are doing that anyway. Manufacturing is tricky. But there’s a lot of very intelligent people working on it.

We see what’s going on. On the whole it doesn’t affect what we do because it’s so different. But we look at almost every technology that’s going on, being announced, that we can see on the Internet.

I don’t often do it personally. We have scouts that do it. And just occasionally there’s something with a bit of interest. For example, bearing-less bearings — air bearings — have always interested us. They’re jolly good for lots of applications, but unfortunately they don’t work in ours. We’re constantly stopping and starting, and you can’t really do that with air bearings.

Our motor there is 110,000 rpm. It’s a terrifying speed. You know, jet engines go at 17,000, and a Ferrari racing engine is about 19,000, and basically your average vacuum cleaner motor is about 30,000. We’re up at 110,000. If you go slightly off-balance, you hit a lateral force of about 40 tons, so it’s a tricky area to work in.

Wired: It sounds like designing vacuum cleaners can be as difficult as designing an aircraft or rocket engine.

Dyson: Yes, because you have to go through the same basic problems, but we have to do it for less money. And we have to produce millions of them, and every one has to be perfect.

On patent reform and navigating a global business

Dyson: Patents haven’t changed since Henry VIII granted the first patent, which he granted for 20 years, and he forced the patentee to publish what he’d done, which all patentees hate because that shows people how to get around it.

I think patents are very good, up to a certain point. The controller at the US patent office famously said (I think it was in 1901), “We can shut down the office now, because there’s nothing more to be invented.” It’s not such a flippant mark. Before 1900, if you invented a fax machine, you got a patent for a fax machine. Now, all you can get a patent for, because everything has been invented, is a little improvement on something. By the way, that “little improvement” could be a really big improvement, because it really makes the big difference. But everybody else can make everything about the same machine except the one thing that makes a big difference. They work out a way of getting around that, which makes it look as though they’re selling the same thing, but it isn’t the same thing, and so the public is duped.

I think patents are not broad enough. They also need to be a bit longer now, because development cycles are so long. The system is a good system, but it needs to be stronger. You get this patent trolling, where people claim to invent something that goes around the real inventor, and then they threaten him with a lawsuit. So you have people using patents as a defense mechanism, so if you get sued using this one, you can threaten using that one. Then you get it in front of a jury that has to try to decide technical matters, and it becomes very difficult.

I think it’s gotten ridiculous. Just vastly too complex, in America and Britain particularly, because there’s so much discovery, which is not very clever. You don’t want to have to give away all the secrets of your R&D department.

Now, in Europe they don’t do that. They really just stick to the facts. And then the case is probably 2 or 3 hours in a court, and you get the decision a couple of months later. So win or lose, you don’t mind, because it doesn’t cost that much. It may be rough justice, but you get rough justice in here and in Britain [as well]. It’s just that it doesn’t sink you in the process.

If you’re an individual or a small business and you invent something, it costs you a fortune to patent it in every country throughout the world. You may only be able to afford to patent it in a few countries, and then you have to pay patent renewal fees. If you can struggle through all that, and then someone copies it, you’re in for a $10 million lawsuit. What are you going to pay for that with? In Europe, it might be $60,000 or $100,000. And that’s affordable.

On globalization

Wired: Did you ever imagine that you would be running a global manufacturing and commercial business?

Dyson: No. I ran a business, an engineering company that sold high-speed landing craft around the world, so I knew a little bit of what it was like. It was a very small company. But I never imagined I’d be doing what I’m doing now.

Wired: How has running the business globally changed over the years? Where do you think it’s going?

I do what I continue to do for the last 40 — what is it now, 43? — years, which is to go into the workshop with the engineers every day, and sort out all the problems and work out what we’re going to do next. That bit of it hasn’t changed at all. The scale’s gotten bigger. The philosophy of what we’re doing and striving every day to innovate and improve our products is exactly the same.

I’ve got wonderful people, everywhere, and we talk; visiting places, you learn more about them. As the world becomes a global market, those differences narrow. We started off designing vacuum cleaners specifically for Japan, intending not to sell them anywhere else. We now sell them everywhere, because the average New York apartment halves in size every five years, and the average size of a new build of a house in England is smaller than the average new build of a house in Japan.

We have trouble in Brazil, China and India, because people who can afford vacuum cleaners have servants. They’re interested in Burberry and Gucci, but not vacuum cleaners. But the rest of the world is remarkably similar when it comes to cleaning the home.

On falling behind in education and global competition

New Dyson engineers are asked to build something together on their first day at work

Wired: The United States is worried about education and innovation in global economy. Based on your operating everywhere, what’s your million-mile view of the US’ standing in a global economy?

Dyson: I would say that you’re in much the same position as we are [in the UK]. In my view, we’re not producing enough engineers and scientists, and it’s a pity because we have a wonderful track record — still do have a very good track record — of producing lots of patents and lots of discoveries in our universities. We’re sort of at the very sophisticated, highly developed end. And the peculiar thing is that scientists and engineers haven’t taken the public with them. So you produce 12 times as many lawyers as engineers, you produce about 65,000 engineering graduates a year and we produce 22,000. India produces, I think, about a million. China certainly 600,000. Iran produces 55,000 engineers a year. So does the Philippines. So does Mexico.

So what this is doing is that developing countries are producing vast numbers of engineers, and their publics see engineering and science as the future in schools and the educational systems.

Wired: Why do you think that changed in our respective countries?

Dyson: I think we had the disease before you did. But when you become rich and so on, you want to do the finer things in life. The finer things are not working in factories developing technology and science. It’s being a journalist.

Wired: [laughter]

Dyson: Fifty percent of British graduates of all disciplines want to go into the media. And 33 percent of girls at school want to be models. I don’t have figures for America, but in England, 15 percent of the girls want to be scientists, which I thought was fantastic. But then I discovered they all want to be pathologists, because of that CSI program. So children are enormously influenced by the media.

We’ve started a program in Chicago for doing design and technology classes after school. Children aged between 9 to 14 are really interested in technology and science; it’s fascinating, and they’re very inventive, actually. We do projects with them. We use vacuum cleaner components to make them, and solve problems that they observe themselves at home.

But somehow after that sort of age they get told that, you know, that’s not an academic subject, you’ve got to do something serious, or something easier, so that you can get a degree. A degree is the best thing to get. So, you know, we all end up being lawyers and accountants and going into the media and become models and all of those other things. We’re not interested in going to factories and doing things that create wealth.

The developing countries have it absolutely right. In Singapore, 40 percent of all university graduates … are engineers, of both sexes. They make sure they get a gender mix, and they do lots of posters showing girl engineers and scientists. It sounds silly, but it works. I think it’s 2 percent of graduates in British universities are doing engineering. I would say the percentage here must be lower.

Wired: We import a lot of our engineers to do work at the graduate level.

Dyson: So do we [in the UK]. But we chuck them out. You don’t chuck them out, you try to keep them. Eighty percent of the postgraduate workers in science and engineering in Europe are from outside the EU. Of the 2,500 extra postgraduate posts made available, only 50 were taken outside of British [citizens].

We do a number of projects at British universities, and I don’t think there’s one British person — well, there’s one, one British person in one of the projects at Cambridge, but otherwise they’re all from outside the EU. So my foundation is providing grants and scholarships for people to read at universities, doing postgraduate work and pay them proper living wages.

Someone doing a doctorate is paid between 7,000 pounds and 12,000 pounds, that’s about $10,000 or $15,000 per year. That’s something like $15,000. They’re not going to stay on; they’re going to go to something like a bank where they make $60,000 per year. I told David Cameron he should pay them 45,000 pounds a year, which is the median of what they’d earn if they went into a bank. I said, “It won’t cost you anything, because no one’s doing it.”

On education reform and encouraging technology investment

Wired: How do we change the education system to help students get interested in science and engineering?

Dyson: It’s difficult. We did a report for David Cameron just before he became Prime Minister called “Ingenious Britain.” [PDF] We said there were several aspects to that. We could use an hour to talk about it. But broadly:

What governments should do is take a great deal of interest in engineering projects, and big infrastructure projects. What they tend to do is shuffle it aside, not discuss it; they would rather it wasn’t there.

Actually, they should bring it out, bring it into the open and talk about it with the public. Talk about whether nuclear power is the right way to do, whether it should be solar power, whatever it is, have a big, big discussion about it. Make it a really important thing.

And then make a decision. And make your decision clear to everybody so that universities start developing technologies to solve the problem; so that children and parents see that engineering decisions and technology decisions are a matter of importance.

Then children would be inspired at school to get involved in solving those problems, or in learning about those problems. And because universities are piling on it, companies will then pile on it, because they can make money on it by taking up university research. So you’ve got a whole nation invested and interested in solving an infrastructure project.

What happens at the moment is it’s put down. Politicians try to play it down, because they’re difficult decisions, and they don’t want to get the blame for it. They don’t want to make the wrong decision.

Take France, for example. France decided very early on that they didn’t have any oil, and the only way out of it was nuclear power. So they developed nuclear power, and they’ve got very good nuclear power, and very good engineers; they have great capability in France. They decided high-speed trains were the way forward, so they developed high-speed trains. They decided to stay in the aircraft industry and make very good aeroplanes. So the French public knows that engineering is esteemed and valued. And if you’re an engineer in France, you’re the most esteemed profession. So they’ve got it right, in that sense, of public interest.

Politicians can do that. But they don’t, because most of them are not engineers or scientists or ever had anything to do with manufacturing, or probably ever having been a teacher. They’re mostly lawyers. Or journalists.

At schools and at universities, we’ve got to favor math teachers and physics teachers. We’ve got to pay them more. You’ve got to make physics, math and engineering important subjects at school.

You’ve got to find out that they’re not more difficult. They sound more difficult, but they’re not more difficult. You’ve got to pay people to go to universities to study engineering and science. And you’ve got to pay researchers proper money.

It’s an important part of education. You can’t ignore it and hope that some people will do it.

Manufacturers are partly to blame, because they haven’t shown that what they do is exciting and interesting. They’ve gone on to produce these dull products, often in a dull way, and then not talking about it.

There are fiscal things you can do, which is what we’ve done in England. We’ve upped the tax allowance for R&D investment. Now, if you’re a start-up business, you obviously aren’t paying tax. So what you can do is pre-take your tax allowance. We’ve got it up to the point in England now where if you spend a million dollars in one year on development, and you’re not making money, you get a million dollars back from the government, and that pays for the next year.

We need to encourage investors to invest in high-technology startups. You’re very much better about that here [in the US] than we are [in the UK]. You’ve got about $20 billion in private money going into start-ups; we have about a billion dollars. And it helps that you also have a giant domestic market; we have to export everything.

On Apple and Steve Jobs, brand to brand, innovator to innovator

Dyson: I imported the first Mac into England in 1984; you know, the beige box. I imported what I think were the first four that came into England. I never opened the instruction manual. That was the best thing about it.

Wired: Have you ever met Mr. Jobs?

Dyson: I’ve never met him [Steve Jobs], or his designer [Jonathan Ive], no. We used to exchange products, but that stopped that after a while, unfortunately. I just buy his now. [Laughter]

[At Dyson,] we were the first to do a totally see-through product. The iMac came out later, but we did it first. Jonathan Ive bought one in England. It was a new type of material you could use that gave these rather beautiful translucent turquoises and blues, and we did a couple of vacuum cleaners with that.

Jonathan Ive bought one when he came back to England and asked us to send another one over for Steve Jobs, which I did. But it was very annoying because I then get Japanese journalists coming into my office saying, “Ah, you copy iMac.”

Wired: [laughter]

Dyson: But what’s wonderful about Apple, I mean, over the last 10 years, you hear all these stories about how manufacturing is dead, Google’s the future, all this kind of thing. But what’s the biggest and richest company in the world? It’s the company that makes things. They make serious things.